Paul Carney
Visual Artist

The fresh-faced pupils sat in front of you for the first time have had a long history of drawing and have formed some very strong opinions about their ability. They have all judged themselves against the best 'drawer' in their previous school and they believe that to be good at art you have to be good at drawing. Art teachers may tell them otherwise but they believe it's true. In fact, not many pupils pass an art exam at a high grade if they can't draw unless they have a pretty special teacher.

 

So their first art lesson is usually a still life observation drawing, sat in silence drawing a simple object (usually shoes, yawn) so you can see who can construct, measure and shade already. And it's usually a minority of the class. Then you spend hours in their lessons over the next few years teaching them how to shade, perspective, proportion etc. and you test them again when they get to exam level and you find that STILL the majority of them aren't that good. Isn't it frustrating? But the problem isn't them, it's you. All you have taught them over the last few years is that drawing is realism and they have to learn to draw realistically to be good, which is what they believed in the first place.

 

But drawing isn't all about realism, that is only one style of drawing, so why are you still sticking shoes in front of them? Drawing is a hugely diverse field and a lot of contemporary drawing relies on graphic communication rather than realism. And since graphic drawing is the most popular form of drawing in children why aren't you allowing them to draw that shoe in a graphic style? Or what about on a tablet? Maybe they might prefer to do a sculptural drawing of it in wire? If you narrow your success criteria to realism then a large proportion of your class will feel like failures right from the very first lesson. So you have to constantly teach your pupils that:

• Drawing is diverse.

• There are lots of different styles of drawing.

• They have to find their own style of drawing and develop it.

• Drawing isn't a competition to see who's best.

• We should only compare our drawings to our own earlier drawings, not anyone else.

• You don't have to be good at traditional drawing to be good at art.

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GCSE Exam Level Drawing

The specification for GCSE art requires drawing to be a much more focussed element to Assessment Objective 3.

 

The natural temptation therefore is to spend more time mastering traditional drawing skills, especially in Key Stage 3 and certainly into the first projects of Key Stage 4. Now, I agree these skills are important and I've produced a whole web page of presentations and tutorials on learning traditional drawing techniques. They are important and they require regular practice, repetition and practice to develop. The beauty of my Online Drawing Programme is that your pupils can do it themselves at home too. But teaching drawing skills is a delicate balancing act between developing the Fine Motor Skills needed for accurate Realism and developing other, equally valid forms of Expressive, Abstract, and Exploratory Drawing. Your Key Stage 3 curriculum should contain a wider drawing programme that includes other styles of drawing such as contemporary, abstract, sculptural, digital or expressive. Pupils should learn to draw in a variety of ways and find which ones suit their learning style.

This is borne out in the GCSE art exam itself which goes to great lengths to tell us that drawing is diverse and varied and nowhere is it mentioned that pupils will be measured by their ability to draw realistically. Take this quote from the OCR GCSE (9–1): Drawing for different purposes and means, February 2015:

Whichever specialism is studied, the method of drawing should be appropriate to the area of study.

• In Fine Art students recording from observation could work in a traditional and descriptive way or they could use expressive mark-making to document their response to things seen. (Source Pearson Exemplar material.)

• Learners in the textiles specialism draw in pencil, with fabric materials as well as with stitch and weave.

• In Photography, photographers draw with ‘light’. They use and compose images that take into consideration line, tone, texture, pattern and line.

• Drawing in three-dimensional design can take a number of forms including Marquette, sketching manually or by instrument (straightedge or set squares and the drafter may use several technical drawing tools to draw curves and circles) and computer-aided drawing.

• Critical and Contextual candidates ‘draw’ using collected or researched materials as well as in written forms

• Drawing for Graphic Communication uses line art, graphs, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, or other images.

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